None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, and highway beautification project.

For the purpose of a Keynesian stimulus it doesn’t matter if it’s spent on a park or a highway beautification project. Any spending is better than tax cuts, you could pay people to dig holes and fill them up again and that would be superior to tax cuts. Spending on parks or museums would also be better than military spending, which most of these fools have no problem with, because military spending tends to be very inefficient at creating jobs.

A concept that’s important here is that of positive externalities. A park or a museum or a theater or an art center is a positive externality for the community it resides in. It brings in tourists and gets them to spend money. People go to Chicago or Paris or New York just to see the theaters and museums, they go to Banff, for, well Banff. The museum or theater or art center doesn’t get all the money, but the community does and is richer for it. And, for the record, the original New Deal spent a good chunk of money on both the arts… and parks. This is a good time to spend on both, since they will be there for Americans essentially forever and they’re cheap right now.

71 Responses
to “Most Senators Are Economic Morons”

these people are either morons or putting their personal political preferences ahead of the country’s good.

The pukes don’t give a rats ass about the United States, or any of her citizens. The f’ing dems are no better. This whole thing makes me ill. I was stupid enough to think this time around things would be different.
(spit)

California’s program is modeled on the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put three million young, unemployed men to work from 1933 to 1942. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “tree army” or “soil soldiers” planted more than two billion trees, restored eroding soil in the Dust Bowl states, developed 800 new state parks, erected one million miles of fences, and built bridges, roads and 13,000 miles of hiking trails in places like Yosemite and Grand Canyon National Parks.

“This was without a doubt the most popular New Deal program; it radically transformed the landscape of this country,” said Neil Maher, an associate professor of history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University and author of “Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement.”

Each year the California corps — whose motto is “Hard work, low pay, miserable conditions … and more!” — employs more than 1,300 young people between the ages of 18 and 25 for a year of hard labor in far-flung corners of the state. They restore salmon habitat in the redwoods, clear brush from highways and build trails in state parks. Most are unemployed young men hailing from poor urban neighborhoods, and nearly half have not graduated from high school.

None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, and highway beautification project.

That has to be one of the stupidest, most counterproductive amendments I’ve ever read.

I figure all 41 Republicans voted for it, who were the Dems that voted for it?

In the Twin Cities, we have yin and yang. For example, the Tyrone Guthrie Theater and Mall of America. Guess which one attracts upwards of 100,000 people a day (yes, a day!) to spend boatloads of money, even now. If those folks had to choose between funding the arts vs. funding the mall…oh, you know. Thus it is that the Norm Coleman’s of the world more or less believe they’re representing the will of the people.

Niall Ferguson is a professor at Harvard University and Harvard Business School, a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution. His latest book is “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.”

assures us that “Keynes can’t help us now.” ;-)

In spite of that title, his op-ed is worth a read, e.g., he insists that insolvent banks have to be restructured, and “Bank stockholders will have to face that they have lost their money.”

I keep saying it till I’m blue or the blue politicians begin to say it themselves;

For the purpose of a Keynesian stimulus it doesn’t matter if it’s spent on a park or a highway beautification project. Any spending is better than tax cuts

this is simply because just about every tax goes somewhere, when you reduce a tax you MUST reduce a service, this means few jobs

the only times you can lower tax is when you have surplus or when there is a market you want to target for specific investment and growth, however that tax reduction is payed by other sectors to make up the deficit you created

simple stuff here, tax reductions lose jobs and wind up costing us more money not less

simply becaues in almost every case that tax is performing a service that will be much more expensive if provided in the private sector

It forshadows the $1.1 trillion that he ran off his “printing press” and helicopter-dropped onto Wall Street. Okay, he really has no printing press and doesn’t drop stuff from his helicopter, but the article explains what he does instead. And his Wikipedia entry explains that he got this idea from Milton Friedman:

On Milton Friedman’s ninetieth birthday, November 8, 2002, he stated: “Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve System. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”

[…]

In 2002, when the word “deflation” began appearing in the business news, Bernanke gave a speech about deflation.[19] In that speech, he mentioned that the government in a fiat money system owns the physical means of creating money. Control of the means of production for money implies that the government can always avoid deflation by simply issuing more money. (He referred to a statement made by Milton Friedman about using a “helicopter drop” of money into the economy to fight deflation.) Bernanke’s critics have since referred to him as “Helicopter Ben” or to his “helicopter printing press.” In a footnote to his speech, Bernanke noted that “people know that inflation erodes the real value of the government’s debt and, therefore, that it is in the interest of the government to create some inflation.”[19]

Your supposed to expand the economy by lending deposits not printing money!
What utter stupidity. When people invest in T-Bills that can be leny to expand the economy…unless of course your rates are so low investors are not attracted.

why not have museums and theaters supported? Actors eat, too.
And theaters support printers, and costumers, and the patrons go out to dinner.
As my wife, the theater artist says, if you build hiways, you have to have somewhere to go.

Truer words were never spoke. It is painful to hear some Senator brag about how he or she cut such and such from the stimulus completing missing the point of what the stimulus is and what dire economic straits the nation’s economy is in.

Treasury takes retired folks money and gives them a little interest for a safe investment. treasury lends it to banks who in turn lend it to business stimulating growth.
!.What part of that do you question?
2. The easy money (low interest rates) drove the housing bubble. Now millions are losing the invesment made into those homes, thir homes amd their credit.
3. Market controls should be on leveraged risks like the the CDOs and Credir default swaps and other paper not backed by real equity. The whole crap pile of near worthless paper taxpayers are being told they have to pay. Not asked.

Neocons want us back where we were in the Dark Ages, torture, non science, poverty,slavery and witch burning. The Dark Ages…burn the books only religious education charter schools get funded…but but but wait isn’t that the Taliban agenda?

btw, as sister and guardian of a man who has mental retardation, I now know why this post got under my skin, big time, to wit:

Moron: A person of mild mental retardation having a mental age of from 7 to 12 years and generally having communication and social skills enabling some degree of academic or vocational education. The term belongs to a classification system no longer in use and is now considered offensive.

The Republicans are the Keep America Barefoot and Pregnant Party ( Rapists are encouraged to select the mother of their rape-child. If Jesus didn’t want that rapist baby to be born, Jesus would have “limped” the rapist, even while Jesus was memorizing 100 million passwords and ATM codes a day. Jesus also knows mis-typed passwords, you don’t know.

With everyone hurting, layoffs, foreclosures….. Maricopa County (AZ) is closing 163 parks including ALL their bark parks. Libraries are closing earlier and closed Sundays. Where can citizens get “free” recreation, a place to take their kids and/or dogs…… They just shut them down without trying something like user fees to cover the shortfall. The biggest growing process here is movie rentals from libraries….

Just saw the city put heavy grates on all our water drainage tunnels into the catchment areas (downpour water management)….. because the homeless were living in these culverts……

I would like to make a separate point here that is getting lost – a lot of the Senator’s constituents are misinformed as well. Check out the comment section linked to the article. The stupid burns real hard there.

Now perhaps these Senators should know better and should receive good advice, but I think that between our education system and the media, so many people do not understand basic economic concepts that it becomes difficult from a political standpoint to do the proper and right thing.

In a country where the majority of the population doesn’t “believe” in evolution, for example, it’s not a coincidence. Where the Democrats have fundamentally failed is to educate enough people in a simple fashion how stimulus actually works. If I am not mistaken, Friedman had a television series back in the 80s which touted his personal economic views – it is too bad that we don’t have something like that in this day and age, but this time based on fact and not Friedman’s fiction.

It’s getting to the point that soon it will be every man, woman and child for themselves. Just the way the Republicans want it. The U.S. can expect millions more to lose their jobs, increasing suicide rates, more people living in their cars or under bridges but don’t despair. To show their concern for the working and middle classes the corporate media bobbleheads are collaborating with the Republicans to put out a new cookbook with varied recipes for grass soup.

“For the purpose of a Keynesian stimulus it doesn’t matter if it’s spent on a park or a highway beautification project.”

This is the key to the whole thing. Democrats, by and large, accept Keynesian economic theory, and Republicans don’t. Republican economic theory, to the extent that there is any, is based on Adam Smith, updated by Milton Friedman’s laissez-faire Monetarism. In order to take down the Republican’s talking points, one must attack and discredit Friedmanism itself. The Reagan-Bush II version of Friedmanism collapsed in failure at the end of Bush II, but they’re just not willing to accept that yet, and they’re still using their old talking points. Of course, the press by and large is still bamboozled into accepting Friedman’s spin on this.

So it is that Republicans vilify the “stimulus” plan as “wasteful spending,” pointing a Friedmanian spear thrust directly at the heart of Keynesianism.

I have a simpler view. They want to sabotage the results even if the bill passes over their objection. They have two things to prove: government spending did not end the Great Depression; conservative Republicans have the one sure cure to the economy — more and deeper tax cuts. Sabotaging the response of the Obama administration is for them a two-fer.

ABC national news just put George Will up opposite Paul Krugman, after all. So basically, they’re saying that a columnist whose only real expertise appears to be in the history and traditions of baseball is the equal of a Nobel prize-winning economist with a history of publications in the field of economics.

And of course Will trotted out the old “the New Deal failed to bring about the end of the Great Depression” BS. Krugman handed him his ass, but I doubt Will even knows it happened, nor did much of the audience.

If Republicans were advising the captain of the Titanic after colliding with the iceberg they would encourage him to put the ship in reverse and smash into the berg again since it was still in their way.

“None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, and highway beautification project.”

I’m. Just. Speechless. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it. It’s not like we want our tax dollars to go toward anything that might make our communities more liveable or anything.

All we need is for more R’s to get around to saying in public that it really is all about a battle of the underlying ideas. because then PBO can take them apart both with rationality and with the public’s rejection of that thinking in the last election. And then the R’s will lose. Boehner opened the door to this yesterday with his “90% of a bad idea is still a bad idea” line, and all the D’s should jump on this ASAP.

It seems to me that the stimulus bill isn’t as forward looking as it could be and doesn’t maximize what could be done in terms of job creation incentives for engaging in productive activity, including creative and cultural activities. But I do agree they’re idiots – and what’s even worse – willful idiots. They fiddle while Rome burns.

Our country is immeasurably enriched by the schools, post offices, train stations, park amenities,communication grids, public art, oral histories and historic building and engineering recording projects, all sponsored by the federal government to provide employment during the Great Depression. What will be the legacy of our era? Commemorative tax breaks?

I don’t think so. These folks are all millionaires and can earn lots more when they leave office. They have excellent healthcare. Were the laws against teaching slaves to read stupid?

They work for the corporations and the status quo. It’s logical for them to oppose museums, expanded education, freethinking of any kind. They don’t want money for birth control or even to fund plans for flu pandemics (that means big epidemics). When and if a flu pandemic comes, they will say, just as they say of our current economic crisis, “nobody could have known”. They will have to be forced to approve meaningful healthcare reform and reduce military spending. If our insane military spending isn’t reduced, a big economic stimulus will have harmful financial effects- that’s true. Signing a petition or sending an email to these aristocrats won’t get us anywhere.

Think about this song by Ry Cooder,
Now the workingman must be well warned whenever headlines scream, “Your rights must yield, the bombs must fall to save democracy”. The flag they fly, their stew of lies served up at voting time like poison under the gravy on Highway 99.

They often contradict themselves, our lords, but they are not stupid. They have fooled the voters many times before, they expect to continue with their winning hand.

I know the thread has moved on, but this just breaks my heart. So many things at my University were built by the WPA, most impressed on me is the wonderful Auditorium, built of our own Indiana limestone (I’m talking about Indiana U Bloomington) in the mid to late ’30’s, and in use, constantly, year-round, ever since.
Permanent benefit, still going strong +/- 70 years later.

That amendment, and the ocnstant refrain of “wasteful spending” just makes me want to tear my hair out.
There, I feel better, even tho’ no one was here to hear me.